Italia

I went to Italy. A month ago. Believe me, I’m just as disappointed as you are that this post is only popping up now. Before I left, I was urged by several friends, acquaintances, strangers even, to take many, many pictures while abroad. Such urgings were frequent, and emphatic, and, on several occasions, ended with these individuals offering up their own cameras to do the job. I can only conclude such gallant efforts stemmed both from their own desire to later see these photographs, and from the fact that they had already seen my cell phone and made the assumption that surely my camera too was technologically out of date. I did go to Italy, and I did take photos.

The truth is, I don’t really take photos. Yes, my also out of date computer hard drive is overflowing with food photo-shoots and artifacts of culinary school recipe testing, with most of the virtual film from these events serving as surplus and useless; documenting my lunch that is rapidly going limp. These photos are staged; they’re preplanned, and they take me a reasonable amount of time and arranging. I’m not claiming to have posted any monumental bits of photography on this blog, but let’s just say it’s not for lack of effort. But, out in the real world, I’m just not the person who photo-documents the better part of her day. I currently have classmates who update their virtual status both to show what they had for lunch, and then their facial expressions to demonstrate how they felt about it, all under the guise of typing down class notes in our afternoon biology lecture. I take down notes in a notebook; a collection of paper gathered and connected with a cloth binding that, until now, hadn't seemed quite so disconnected from everything else.

I feel I should preface this next part by saying  that I think photography is an art, a beautiful one, and a craft I admire in many friends, in fact. It’s simply not my own. I’m a writer, or at least I pretend to be in those few moments when I find the time to type things other than homework assignments. I don’t take photos because I don’t need them. I’m a storyteller—my memory isn’t tied up in the image, it’s tied up in the moment. That’s the thing about memory that makes it so unique—it’s not an exact copy of what happened, but a translation. I don't need to the see the image, my brain recreates it two-fold with characters, and plotlines. When I take a photo, it never quite captures the memory for me in the same way. It’s not enough. It’s a static representation of something far more dynamic. I have photos of Venice’s Grand Canal, for example, as seen from our hotel room. Except when I look at these images now, as they are, all I see are the flaws—the scaffolding obstructing the beautiful, ancient façade across the waterway. It lacks the emotion that is so entangled in my memory of the moment when I climbed into the window sill of our 3^rd story hotel room, knocked my shins against the too low guard rails, and hung my torso out over the water to take the photo. Nor does the picture actually capture the gasp my mother let out, high pitched and long, with only her nose protruding into the window directly to my left and the rest of her body grounded a solid few feet back inside the safety of the room. There is a pretty good mother-heights-issue story here, but I’ll save it for another time. The point is, the moment was profound; the photo is ordinary.

So, it may surprise you that I have few photos of the food in Italy. I have a couple shots of an outdoor market in Venice, and one plate of scrumptious risotto consumed on a back street in Florence. The thing is, this trip was my vacation. The only vacation I’ve taken in many years, and living in the moment was key. Oh, and there were also several occasions in which blood-sugar issues got the best of me and by the time we were settling down to lunch I would have eaten the tissue paper wrapping around my prosciutto sandwich before I would bust out my camera and stall ingestion for photogenic conquest. More importantly, what I ate, I ate out of pure love of the moment. Humble sandwiches eaten squatting on the stone steps of a side canal in Venice watching the Gondaliers paddle by. One of my favorite meals was actually at the house of friends—a couple—who placed a huge colander of baccelli—fava beans— directly on the table. And we ate them raw, snapping the pods open over our plates, and popping the crisp beans into our mouths, followed with a softer Pecarino cheese and the most wonderfully salty bread, and all washed down with enough white wine. There are no pictures of this humble but entirely perfect meal as I was too busy playing with their cats and stomping through the garden on the patio to bother digging my camera out of my purse. Still, I left the evening full.

Venice, Florence, and out into Tuscuny in two weeks. When friends ask me now what I loved most about the trip, I don’t really know what to say, because there was so much. Too much, really. I had to ask my mother to stop calling me for a few days after our return—she was continually reminiscing and asking me what I would like to do on our next trip. I was trying to find my footing back in my real life and the intensive summer science course I had crash-landed into. Italy made my real life seem, well, somehow less exciting. But when I do think back to Italy, there really was so much I adored; it’s overwhelming. I loved watching the Gondolas, and climbing the hundreds of steps to the top of the Duomo. I loved entering churches that were older than I care to count, and standing in front of works of art I’d only every dreamed of seeing. And more than anything I loved stomping miles through an ancient, urban settings that unfolded anew everyday.

And then, well, a lot of what I loved about the trip is a lot smaller, too, in many ways. I loved falling asleep every night in Venice at around 2am in an argument with my mother over who was on breakfast duty the next morning. That jetlagged individual would have to wake, dress, and put of the façade of worldy perkiness to greet Stefano, the innkeeper, and our breakfast that arrived outside our door every morning, promptly, at 8am. The other person got to stay in her pajamas, and hide under the covers like a child pretending that if she couldn’t see the innkeeper, he couldn’t see her. Surely we could have requested a slighter later arrival time for our first meal of the day, but we feared it would make us seem sluggish. And I loved breakfast—just orange juice and an apricot jam filled croissant, and two more little rolls that we transformed into lunch with a bit of cheese and cured meat from the local grocer, and ate at water’s edge in the high heat of Venice spring afternoons, and it felt so good.

I suppose that’s the trick to loving vacations—finding those tiny moments, along with the momentous ones, that are whole heartedly special, and have a better chance of migrating back into your real life as well. Tonight, I’m sitting in my room in Brookline, both windows open, homework done for the evening, and the frothiest beer sitting at the end of my desk. The photo is mundane. But my memory of this moment, well, that’s a much better story.